Well, then you misunderstand my point, I was answering his questions with questions for him to consider.

I'm arguing, for the sake of argument mainly, that the way stuff works without the formula (or even whatever AP fix) isn't necessarily unintentional. His formula IS a fix to that if that was actually a problem that needed fixing. Or if the the game is layed out in a way which supports ammo not being anything more than "live ammo" and "dummy ammo". The more I play it the more I'm convinced that might've not been a bug, or at least a bad unintentinal feature. It's pretty legit tbh, when you take other elements into account, I suspect that might've been done on purpose.

And that his assumptins about what exactly needs changing may have been both more subjective than the originally thought, and may have been wrong. Maybe some of them were.

Not that's anything's wrong with the formula itself in vaccum, mind, you if you take the assumptions at face value, or that you couldn't mod fallout 2 to work with it...

@lujo
Let me start off by saying we see things very differently when it comes to the game; you appear to take things at a high level view, making connections and drawing conclusions based on what appears to be your own opinion with hope that you will get community support. At times you have shown incite and I have supported some of your thoughts previously.

I tend to focus on specific aspects of the game and attempt to understand them based on previous discussions had in the forum and from what little I can gleam in code. My mod is the result of that, with help granted by others, and credit given freely with gratitude.

Ok, so I took a look, and here's what I think. Don't take any of this the wrong way - I'm sure the game can work if you apply your formula, this is just for fun and science and to give you something to ponder if you ever feel like it + a bunch of somewhat too verbose and rambling well intentioned fun.

Also, I can't make heads or tails of the formula, but I can of your assumptions about it, so that's what I'll comment:

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You could have started the conversation off by asking more about the original damage formula, since you mention you cannot make sense of it. I did my best to describe it in the first post of this thread. You have to click the first Show button to read what I wrote.

2- The critical multiplier is applied too early in my opinion; how does one score a critical hit if it's unknown whether the hit got through the target's armor damage threshold or got past the target's armor damage resistance yet?

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By crits being the default armor bypassing mechanic? As a design decision? To make critters occasionally hit you for lots even after you've found the game-sellig iconic armors? Which is supposed to not have a downside? And to give any character a chance to beat the bad guys regardless of their armor?

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To answer your first question; no I never assumed or implied (or never meant to) that critical hits were the default armor bypassing mechanic. For your second question I not sure what you mean; did I assume it was the original design decision to use critical hits as the default armor bypass? No. Your third, fourth and fifth questions appear to be asking again if I made specific assumptions; the answer is no.

As for how it works in RL sense, well, most medieval warfare conissted of causing critical damage despite the other guy having armor - breaking bonse, necks, windpipes, ribs, causing internal bleeding from impact, jamming their own armor into places where it wasn't supposed to be jammed... Plenty of swords were basicly large metal bars designed with this in mind, it's rather more easy than it sounds. I'm not a big fan of applying RL logic to Falout 2, especialy when it comes to combat, but I wouldn't be perplexed by this question even if RL logic was what I had to go by.

Just saying, though, I'm not in love with the original design, either, if something else works better in practice and doesn't mess up what the original design was ment to do XD

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I wasn't trying to acheive a RL simulation, but rather I tried to determine what the original logic/rules could have been that they were trying to work towards, find where they failed to meet that logic or those rules, and apply what could be a fix. I tried draw from other discussions in the forum about how people thought damnage should work and go from there.

I do find your example of armor being jammed an interesting argument against not moving the critical multiplier from where/when it was applied originally, but that would imply a partial failure of the armor. This sort of rule is not covered in the original formula, nor is it covered in the critical hit tables. The critical hit tables speak to "bypass armor" which is a complete armor failure, which actually supports my decision to move where/when the critical multiplier was applied.

And why not - there's bullets that stick in you, bulet's that don't stick in you, bullets that fragment, bullets which leave small holes, bullets that leave large holes, incendiary bullets, internatinally banned bullets... The influence of a gun on a bullet is pretty standard, what the bullet does after leaving the barrel can have a million influencing factors in RL, so the variance of the end result has very little do do with a gun. Again, RL logic, I know, just saying...

And having bullets be the main influencing factor on damage variance is a nice way for the devs to have all sorts of guns around but make sure some enemies are ussing dummies (AP and terrible by default munitions) and some enemies are using live ammo (JHP).

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Here you seemed to have missed my point; we are in agreement that there are different types of ammo and that they will cause different types of damage, but let me clarify that the min.-max. damage range of a weapon (i.e. 10mm pistol 5-12) is meant to provide the game mechanic of all hits to the enemy using that weapon not be the same. So once a hit is established, that should be when the ammo used is looked at and it's values taken into account. An ammo values define what type of ammo it is to the damage formula.

The original damage formula does not have any notion of what type of ammo was used because the ammo had no direct affect on the armor values, ammo values either increased or deceased the hit (the random number picked from the ramge of min. to max.) and then that hit number was affected by the armor values.

My mod gave the damage formula an understanding of the type of ammo used, and what affect it had on the targets armor (or target if the critter had no armor), and then applies the hit taking into account the adjusted armor values.

Do you see the difference? Are you starting to get an understanding of how flawed the original formula is?

If it was ever ment to work any other way they would've given you control over NPC's so that you can rotate ammo according to need as you would need to if the rock-paper-scizzors worked. Phobos fell into the trap of deciding that non-working AP ammo was a bug and even made AP ammo variants for shotguns and AP .223 bullets, but he soon discovered that he needs a party orders hotkey to tell NPC's to swap ammo (I loled hard at this myself, though, as not being given control over NPC's is basically solid proof that AP ammo was never ment to work anyway. I also chuckle when people praise the AP ammo bugfix / weapon mods but are horrified by the idea of using the party combat control "hack").

The way the game works is that you just shoot ammo that does damage and sell ammo that doesn't, and do aimed shots at stuff which is armored, and it's armored to you wouldn't burst everything down like an idiot. Or just shoot at it untill you score a crit, and you're given an effortlessly acquired NPC which can score those crits for you (he was so popular someone even made a voiced talking head for him, small wonder XD).

If what your formula does is make a more interesting system, by all means, I'm not against is, but the game wasn't made with a more complex, and paticularly not a realistic, system in mind. In fact, combat seems to have been more of a way to make you hang around towns and do quest, then mark your progress by allowing you to safely move to the next zone. I basically think combat was dummied out of the game, not bugged. Fiddling w weapons always seems like someone's trying to add actual swordfighting moves to the Monkey Island swordfighting.

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Here you are just providing your own opinion with the implied assumption that they (the original devs) either knew all the issues were there and worked around them, or didn't know there were issues and thought everything was working the way it should.

I completely disagree, and I think I'm safe in saying most others would too. I think the more likely situation was the knew and understood some of the issues; but not all of them, of those they knew about and knew they were not going to address them, those they worked around. But honestly, it's very hard to even guess at what they knew and didn't know. Just as it is equally as hard to know what they intended in all cases and what they didn't.

and second, how is damage multiplied if it's unknown whether the hit got through the target's armor damage threshold or got past the target's armor damage resistance yet?

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Again, because crits are ment to ignore armor? And armor is only there to make sure you do quests and put some skills into small guns so you can actually hit someone? And damage reduction is only there to make sure burst doesn't work on everything ever? And someone in charge of the development had a stroke of genious and decided that special was a dumb idea and that trying to simulate gunfights in a story driven epic RPG realisticaly is unworkable? So they left the descriptions to make it look more complex than what they decided to make the game with? And then it was still unplayable so they added stimpaks to make sure nothing ever goes wrong? And made special case guns and stuff and planted way too much stuff around to make sure combat never really gets in the way of playing the game much?

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Are you asking questions or simply adding question marks are the end of statements? It seems to me you're attempting to imply assumptions that I may have made. First question I already answered, second question is no (not sure why you would even think that), and third question is no and burst is flawed because when you combine the original damage formula's flaws with how the burst hits are determined in the original 'to hit' formula, you get a mess. The rest of the questions just seem to be you ranting on some tangent of thought that has nothing to do with my mod.

4- The ammo divisor is applied incorrectly in my opinion; dividing the damage by the ammo divisor only reduces the damage, why would anything about ammo be designed to reduce damage?

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So that enemies could use the same guns as you do but don't do as much damage as you do as they're all not ment to win any fights, while you were ment to win every one you're properly equipped for? To make some of the ammo you can find or that enemies drop useless to you because it's too easy too get? Most ammo in the game is being shot at YOU, and the game needed a way to modify the damage, but couldn't do it through modifying either the enemies or the guns, so ammo was the only thing by which you could modify the damage source regardless of which armor the CO has on (meaning in effect where's he been allready).

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When you ramble off thoughts like this, it is difficult take this as constructive critism, and just seems you wanted a place to rant.

The original damage formula and my mod are applied to ALL, so all things being equal between a npc/critter and the player, the same damage will be done by both. The main difference is that the player has traits, and perks, which more often than not will give the player the advantage and thus the player will do more damage. I don't believe (at least i cannot recall) if npc/critters have traits or perks.

5- The difficulty setting is applied too early in my opinion; again, how do you apply something that is to either make the damage more or less if it's unknown whether you got by the target's armor yet?

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Because if you turn the dial up or down, stuff is ment to do more damage to you regardless of how far you get in the story? To not make power armor even more of a plot armor?

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You need to understand the original formula before implying asumptions that I may have made.

The original formula simply used the difficulty setting to increase or decrease the hit damage before armor was taken into account, which really seemed odd. So this was less a bug to fix as it was a decision I made to have it make more sense along with the other changes I made.

2- The critical multiplier (CM) is only applied after it is determined that the hit got through the target's armor
--- how else can a hit be considered critical unless it got past armor to hurt a supposedly sensitive spot on the target

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Congrats, you're not playing Fallout 2 anymore XD You might be playing a better game for all I know, but Fallout 2 it isn't.

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I can see why you might think this, in the critical hit tables there is clearly stated effect of "bypass armor". However, the original formula had no tie-in to the critical hit table where some notion of the type of critical hit was conveyed. So with my limited knowledge I had no way to address this.

3- The ammo multiplier (X) to me seemed out of place, so I compared all the ammo in the game
--- it seemed that JHP ammo was the one (for the most part) which had an X value greater than 1
--- so knowing JHP, was not designed to penetrate armor but rather when it did to fragment and cause more damage, I chose to use X to reduce the target's armor damage resistance

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Ah, so you basicaly nerfed the "live" ammo? Good on you!

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I wasn't using your definition for the ammo, but the JHP ammo was overpowered because of how the X value from the ammo was applied in the original formula. Yes my mod did "nerf" JHP ammo, but my mod also gave purpose to AP ammo because of my change.

4- The ammo divisor (Y) to me seemed again out of place, so again I compared all the ammo in the game
--- it semed that AP ammo was the one (for the most part) which had a Y value greater than 1
--- so knowing AP, was designed to penetrate armor but not fragment, I chose to use Y to reduce the target's armor damage threshold

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So you basically buffed the "dummy" bullets? Good on you!

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I don't understand your need to over-simplify and impose your own assumptions, the original damage formula caused AP ammo to be useless. Your label of "dummy" bullets makes no sense for the game.

5- The combat difficulty setting (CD) felt wrong to apply like CM, if Easy or Hard were selected
--- so I looked at treating it as a decrease or increase to the target's armor damage resistence value, -20 for Easy and +20 for Hard
--- I tested a similiar decrease or increase to the target's armor damage threshold, and it had no meaningful affect

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So you decided that you didn't like how Fallout 2 difficulty button works, so you made it work only unless you have the end game gear which was allready designed to make you so powerful they had to make cirts bypass armor just to get around it? Good on you!

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All the changes in my mod affect ALL npc/critters and the player, you may not have understood that, and it seems you didn't take the time to understand the original formula or my mod.

Some consequences and realizations to my approach:
1- Some ammo which has X greater than 1 and Y greater than 1, gets both advantages (currently only 2mm EC and 4.7mm caseless)

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You mean the ammo for the end game stuff which uses the skill you're intended to be using all game long as it affects most of the guns you were ment to be used? The ones with strictly superior stats to anything else which was put as rewrds for long quests or otherwise on guards to ensure they kill you dead if you ever fight them? The stuff that was made powerful enugh to ensure combat doesn't get in the way of completing the game? The default "boring invincible apex weapons" stuff with no dummy bullets as it was designed to be the only thing to inconvinience you after you get the game selling armor and was ment to be used against guys in the game selling end game armor? XD

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Let's see, again more assumptions that my mod somehow brings drastic balance issues along with you imposing your own assumptions again. How about you try playing with my mod on; without any changes to any weapons/ammo/armor, and tell me from first hand experience if the game feels better or worse. Have you even looked at the tool I provided to compare original calculation values against the new ones?

--- the Cell ammo (both kinds) is bugged, it does nothing to modify the target's armor values, it should have been like JHP ammo in values (X=2 and Y=1)

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Except it's in every easter egg random encounter / secret location which makes guns that use it never run out, and the guns that use it were never really ment to be used anyway?

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If you use the calculation tool I provided then you should be able to figure out why I did what I did. Other than that it's obvious you didn't take the time to try and understand the decision I made and would rather just impose your own assumptions.

Who knows, but if the change would make the Grese Gun les silly good, I support it. 9mm ball is inconcequential, needler who knows, and the shotgun shells are probably ment to be default boring ammo anyway.

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At this point you should have had some understanding of what I was getting at - if not then I'm not sure how I can help you understand.

4- All weapons that use an ammo with X and Y values of 1 and an ammoDRM of 0 have no advantage whatsoever against the target's armor damage threshold and damage resistance (in the original calculation and mine)
--- this is why Laser weapons don't do much damage, its not the weapon, it's the ammo and the fact that most armor in the game have high laser damage resistance

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It's probably because they hand it out like cakes, and to prevent people from rushing out to get it early and laying waste to the early game with lasers. I think they weren't ment to be used by you at all, they were just ment to be a plot device. And they allready made big guns the default "silly dangerous enemy weapon" which actually could be used by the player, so lasers kinda didn't have a place. Too many weapon types.

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It seems you cannot accept that there were issues/bugs with much. You can see plainly how ammo affected laser's performace with my calculation tool and that even my change to the damage formula alone could not help. But add the modified ammo to my modified damage formula and lasers improve greatly.

5- I may be close to what the original devs had intended
--- ammo was always meant to affect how the target's armor reacted to a hit, not how it might increase the min.-max. of a weapon's damage potential

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Eh, the guy who originaly picked weapon and ammo types was a gun nut, and the wole game is an incomprensible jumble of items which have letters and numbers instead of names to someone who isn't one. Heck, learning to mod Fallout 2 would be easier to a vast majority of people if ammo was called "blue bullets", "red bullers", "yellow bullets in black case", "the first pistol", "the first SMG", "the first shotgun". I'm willing to bet an executive somewhere at one point straight up said "People, we're making a game, not a balistics simulator. Make all this crap about 5X simpler. Keep the graphics and labels as is, people aren't gonna look at them anyway. Make sure they don't have to.", and then most of the stuff wich "doesn't make sense" was aplied. So now you know if a gun does adequate damage by shooting it at someone, and if you're not happy, you equip a different gun. If you design a game to have a working AP system, you'd notice it's not working. It's pretty much impossible that something like this would slip one someone who was crazy enough to come up with it.

Having said that, I'm no purist, as long as a weapon/ammo modification doesn't mess anything up I don't mind trying it out (as long as it's compatible with my ussual stuff). However, the likelyhood of messing with it NOT affecting anything, whatever you do, is rather low. And the game was made to be incredibly simple, with combat as more of an aftertought than something which was ment to have serious development, otherwise the random encounters would've been made to work completely differently, and so would the NPC's etc. etc.

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I not sure I agree with your view on how the weapons and ammo were implemented, variety is need to make combat feel more interesting/challenging.

I personally think they were not aware of how broken the formula was. I think they may have been primarily testing combat with melee and guns using JHP ammo, and thus simply missed how other ammo may not have been treated right or the testers may not have been able to describe the problem correctly, thinking that when using a gun with AP ammo performed poorly that there may have been something wrong with the weapon.

I urge you to try my mod and compare against the original. When you use my mod, you should use the script that modifies ammo values as well.

6- Ammo values are the biggest factor in whether a weapon is good or not, second is the weapon's min.-max.
7- Ammo, weapons, and armor values need tweaking; to my previous point, ammo more so than anything else

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Well, technically, the biggest factor is the AP cost, most everything else is smoke, mirrors, flavor and leftovers of a gun nut's megalomania. Oh, and burst range. But if someone's looking to change that, then yes, apart from the AP cost, the biggest impact on a guns performance should work like you say.

And finally - if you do anything at all to any weapon ammo or anything related to combat at all, ever, if you don't go around all the maps and adjust the loot distribution, and then around all the encounters with adjustment to the concequences of buffs/nerfs to both the CO + NPC capabilities and the enemy capabilities, the thing isn't likely to make a situation better. Different, deffinitely, better only possibly. And if the approach to the change you want to apply involves any of the following phrases "I don't agree with this", "This doesn't make sense" anything of that sort, and you're approaching the problem from the perspective where you want to make combat anything more than a zoning tool / bit of flavour, you've probably strayed from the original design.

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You are right that my mod does not ensure game balance, and it was never meant to. It was meant to fix/improve something that is broken in the eyes of many, and was to hopefully provide a foundation for addressing balance, such as you have been trying to do with game progression lujo.

@lujo
NovaRain just reminded me that "bypass armor" effect in the code works as DR/5 and DT/5, so with that then armor is never bypassed entirely. So this supports my decision to move where/when CM is applied.

Thanks NovaRain!

But your partial armor failure still has some merit, so I will give that some honest thought.

Abit late checking this out but ive got my own insights on the armor code.

And the reason im doing it is because we now have like 4 mods to fix it and none of them appear to be focusing on the real problem here. An old iteration of Sfall by Killap seemed to have fixed it but only barely, he was applying a 5/3 damage multiplier to the end result damage for anything with a boost, or a 3/5 multiplier for anything with a penalty.

The original Fallout game concept was built on the gurps roleplaying game system. In gurps, armor only provided the equivalent of damage threshold (the best modern body armor provided about DT 50). The way you got around that was making called shots or using ammunition with a damage divisor. Armor Piercing ammunition worked by applying a divisor to the DT the target had (divide by 2 usually) but then the damage that got through would be divided or multiplied based on its size and type.

The size of the bullet would also increase damage, starting at .40caliber it added another 50% no matter what type of ammo it was, and anything above .50 caliber added 100% (doubled) instead.

Put simply the damage roll in Gurps for an attack pretty much represents its ability to break through armor, while the effect it has on the target is modified afterwards as a result of how the force is being applied
(eg, Impaling attacks like an Energy Weapon, or a Pickaxe would always do +100% damage because it was vicious against the internal organs of a target)

The Fallout developers obviously wanted a more dynamic approach than just applying a static DT modifier to everything (though I have always been in favor of this).

That way you could provide some reduction with lesser armor types that didnt involve reducing the damage to 0 alot, and you could provide good protection for heavier armor that would still let some damage through.

However they didnt quite adapt the Original concept of ammo/armor variation into the game well beyond that. It seemed that their idea of what "armor does for you" is gives you Damage Reduction % just like Fallout 3.

But they wanted to include the DT formula as well. And they forgot to have ammo variants Modify the DT part of the formula.

They also forgot about putting the Damage Multiplier on the back end of the equation like it always was (just before it eats your hit points) instead of the front end.

To me this makes it obvious that . . .

* DR Modifier should mulltiply against (thats right, multiply, not add) both of the DR and DT values.
* Damage Multiplier should be multiplied against the final output damage result after all the other junk is assessed.

...If you have 5mm JHP ammo (DR +35%) that means the DT is multiplied by 1.35 and the DR of the target is multiplied by 1.35. Regular Power armor will resist normal damage at 16/54% and since the assault rifle does 8-16 I think they were saying clearly that it "does nothing to power armor".

...If you have 14mm AP ammo (DR -50%) that means the DR is multiplied by 0.5 and the DR is multiplied by 0.5. Regular Power Armor will only resist normal damage for 6/20% at that rate, meaning that the 14mm Sig Sauer pistol will blow right through it pretty much.

If you shoot someone wearing Power Armor with an Assault Rifle (5mm) it'll never do anything to it without special help if you're using JHP. But if you're using AP it'll almost always do something to it (with the 8/26% it leaves the armor you only need to roll 9 damage points for it to cause at least 1 HP loss).

Simple and straightforward enough, and I always assumed for years that it worked like this.

Then After all the other calculations are ran, be it difficulty adjustments or critical hit multiplier, or the bonuses from perks and traits... Then you multiply the entire result by the Damage Multiplier.

Based on the stats in the proto files you're looking at multipliers of 2/1... 3/2... 1/1... or 1/2. Funny how those fractions I always thought meant 2.0... 1.5... 1.0... or 0.5.

The reason for giving 2mm EC and 4.7mm Caseless the 3/2 modifier is because they wanted it to increase the effect of perk damage with those weapons (+3 per rank of bonus ranged damage, and +8 for living anatomy). But they were throwing the baby out with the bathwater by doing that.

Addendum regarding AP Ammo:
I dont know where people are coming from saying that AP ammo are dummy bullets. There is a reason the military uses them, and being shot by an AP round is not fun and it will hurt or kill you. They are the best at tearing through armor, and after it enters your ribcage you're going to take your damage like a good boy, and its better than being stabbed too.

In fact it will wound somebody almost as badly as a regular "Ball" round (also known in real life as a Full Metal Jacket round, they are one in the same folks). Ball or FMJ bullets dont expand enough for somebody to say that they're twice as good at killing you as an Armor Piercing bullet.

The myth surrounding full metal jacket bullets being highly damaging is because when you shoot a high velocity FMJ round out of a rifle with the proper length it will shatter the bullet on impact. There arent many guns around anymore that can do this - a full length M-16 or precision AR-15 can do it, an M1 Garand firing .30-06 fmj can do it. The M4 Carbine and M249 machinegun cannot perform this feat.

But even then it only works at close range, within about 100 yards. Any shorter barrel length and the bullets will not shatter, and will cause a dismal amount of damage on par with well... an armor piercing bullet.

So if a FMJ or Ball round gets a damage multiplier of 1/1 then I would say an AP bullet should be hitting for 1/1 or at the worst maybe 3/4 if it was some kind of sabot-armor-piercing drillbit type of thing. Because even if the bullet is only an armor piercing core its going to be going faster and Velocity does damage.

...When I played Fallout 1 the AP Ammo was the best ammunition in the game for a given weapon. The Damage Multipliers either didnt work in the engine or they worked in an unusual way. This meant that jhp ammo didnt do any extra damage, and ap ammo didnt do any less, but they affected the DR modifier in opposite directions.

The result being that you could clear out the BOS bunker with a Minigun + AP Rounds + one or two ranks of Bonus Ranged Damage (preferrably two).

My experience playing Fallout 1 coincided with what I expected from real life - - Armor Piercing ammunition is awesome, there's a reason why it costs more in the game than the hollowpoint bullets, and there's a reason why its much rarer than hollowpoint bullets too.

Factor in that this is 80 years in the future and beyond and you can expect that Red Striped ammunition is probably incendiary armor piercing by default, probably with an exploding tip too. So it Should Not be losing any damage at all.

And about Hollowpoints . . .

By putting the Damage Multiplier on the end of the equation where it belongs, the Hollowpoint bullets will still cause greater wounding against targets, but ONLY if they can manage to defeat the armor.

Hollowpoint bullets are not "live" ammunition (all of these ammo types are "live"). They are crap ammunition, antipersonnel, civilian issue. The kind of thing you shoot wild hogs with. Or just the chest of a human being.

They cause good damage because they mushroom, which increases their surface area and makes them malleable to a hard object (armor) deflecting, spalling, and stopping them. If there's nothing hard to absorb and redirect that force then its going to be able to chew through someone's flesh, arteries, heart, and so on. And it will hurt alot more because a 9mm bullet will expand to about 13mm and a 5mm bullet will probably expand out to 8mm or 9mm.

But if you've got a thick deathclaw hide or the ceramic plates of a suit of combat armor then those bullets aren't going to do much. Its like being punched or kicked or hit with a baseball bat at that point. And its not even going to dent power armor, you're only going to hear the impact not feel it.

Which is where the +25% or +35% armor modifier of the JHP bullets makes alot of sense, for applying to the DT as well as the DR.

As for Power Armor being Plot Armor . . . it doesnt matter.

Its unrealistic, even beyond accepting it in game balancing terms, to consider that something that much better than everything else is going to just be in the same ballpark as everything else. Thats like saying you can kill a main battle tank by shooting enough assault rifle bullets at it (maybe after several million of them...).

There is a Reason why you would go to all the trouble to invent Laser and Plasma Weapons. Its not just for logistics, its because normal weapons just wont do anymore, and the alternatives like grenade launchers and rockets are too bulky to be effective en masse.

You can kill power armor guys by throwing heaps of explosives at them, but if a good portion of the army is equipped then youll only kill a small percentage of them and then youll be out of ammo. Explosives and bulky weapons tend not to be too accurate anyway unless you're going to upgrade to smart-guidance electronics (and smart bullets is one thing they dont have in fallout).

By creating Power Armor, which is an entirely realistic (though not economical) proposition, you jump the ladder on arms escalation by at least 2 steps.

You need a handheld weapon that gets a bunch of shots, and has enough firepower or penetration to get through that armor. And shooting somebody with a gun that hits like a .50cal Exploding round (this being a plasma rifle) is good enough to fulfill that role.

Gauss weapons would seem to do that more easily, catapulting a 2mm metal flechette at some extraordinary speed on par with a shaped charge jet would be like taking a direct hit from a 40mm grenade. But those were only new arrivals to the battlefront.

Also I hate to burst people's bubble but making armor Shiny doesnt improve its resistance against excessive power laser shots (which is what a laser gun shoots). After a few microseconds the laser will warp the surface of the armor just enough to produce a snowball effect on deteriorating the reflectivity of it, and by the time the shot has concluded it will not have lost much of its energy compared to unpolished materials.

That part at least I can accept on the terms that its just a game. But it also means that the Lasers in the game are Plot Broke. Not sure why everybody and their grandma has good Laser armor stats, based on game terms it makes sense for the good armor (Metal/Tesla/Power) but everything else should be taking it to the face (I guess combat armor would get a mild benefit just due to ruggedness).

Lasers should definitely be a Deathclaw Killer though . . . particularly on called shots to the EYES.

@HeavySteelRoller : feel free to make your own formula. It is now possible without engine hacks using "hs_combatdamage" hook script. Just google "sfall_modderspack", download it, and study documentation.

I don't like those "hard-coded" mods, especially in aspects where people could never agree. I was hoping to remove it altogether in future sfall versions...

Abit late checking this out but ive got my own insights on the armor code...

(insights)

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You can't fix all of this just by editing the damage formula. Even if you do make AP ammo useful, the fact remains that 90% of everything you fight is wearing Leather armor and below, and enemies almost never use AP ammo against you. The ideal approach would require a massive overhaul of the entire game, making late game enemies wear late game armor, making them use AP ammo, and then retooling the ammo, armor and weapons' stats so that JHP is less effective on armored enemies, and that AP ammo is more effective on armored ones. Then comes the fact that you can't tell your NPCs to switch ammo mid battle, so you'll want to introduce some AI behavior as well...

Long story short, the damage formula is okay in theory, but the ammo, armors and weapons make poor use of it, and the enemy encounters are not well designed. Instead of bending the formula to fit the whole game, rather make the game more in tune with the way the formula works.

It's kind of a shame how much effort has been expended by modders (me included) trying to figure out how to make the Fallout ammo formula work, when doing so wouldn't make a lick of difference. For one, the UI isn't built around the concept of switching ammo to deal with threats differently at all (people are just going to keep using the generic reload button, even if you make it cost as many AP's as opening the inventory to manually switch ammo). And even if people were somehow made to sift through the inventory for every other reload, the AI sure as hell wouldn't, making it an unequal playing field. Finally, even if you would go through the lengths of adapting the AI (which is very cumbersome to do), then all that effort has accomplished a gameplay element which isn't really all that interesting to begin with.

Honestly, if all you're doing is adapting the damage formula, leaving all else in place, then the best approach would probably be to simply strip out all the alt ammo types, set the remaining ones to neutral values (i.e. 1/1 and 0%) so that you can tell the damage you'll do with any given weapon in an instant, and perhaps remove either all the DR or DT values for armors and critters.

@JimTheDinosaur : that's pretty negative way of looking at things. I personally liked playing with YAMM a lot more than without it, even if AI couldn't use it.

I don't see anything impossible regarding adjusting both damage formula AND the game itself. And it IS interesting element in my opinion. There are many factors in why.. for example, making AP ammo rare also makes economy work better by introducing an interest in buying that ammo type. (here goes advertising.. ) in my mod there could be more than 2 types of ammo for one caliber, which differ not only with how they interact with armor DT/DR, but by also giving some special effects (such as different damage type, sounds, explosion radiuses, etc.).

Another point I didn't mention is that I don't feel that intense inventory management suits the setting very much. You're talking about making ammo rarer, which is great for the setting, but doesn't jive well imo with having 3 tiny stacks of different ammo types per caliber in your inventory that you have to micromanage. It's something that suits a tactical shooter better, not a post-apoc scrounge-fest.

What Fallout lacks is combat options beyond walk and shoot, not hyper-detailed gunporn.

@JimTheDinosaur
I would agree about stripping out extra ammo variants. But one of the nifty things thats at the heart of fallout is being able to use different kinds of ammo for the same weapon, its one of the hallmarks of the game and its been maintained throughout the entire series (even fallout tactics).

I wouldnt exactly agree with it but I think most players of the game would feel something was missing.

(my personal compromise for fallout 2 would be just to give only minor differences in the ammo, in which case the ammo you pick up is almost like its just a different brand of the same bullets rather than a functionally different variety. Then change the stats of all the guns to reflect their actual damage ranges in practice).

But there must be a way to affect DT/DR by percentages (specifically DT!!!) even if all the ammo does listed damage. Not all weapons are created equal in the penetration department and if you're going to have Armor in the game at all (and it wouldnt be fallout without it) then you're going to have to take that difference into account.

This isnt dungeons & dragons where almost everything was anti-personnel, and you just had to find a good place to hit the person where their skin was showing. Give me a forcefield and ill have infinite AC.

In fact there shouldnt even be an armor-affected AC Class in fallout, period...
In shooting games your AC is how well you can jedi dodge to confuse somebody's aim.
Thats why its low.

Though I think for theatric purposes there should have been more (and effective) perks to jack up your AC as a result of River Tamm style dodging capabilities.

Take Shotguns for example, even with a deer slug you have alot of damage being caused (almost as much as a .50cal, because its an 18mm projectile). But the penetration is crap - combat armor will stop it and even a tactical kevlar vest will keep it at bay.

Buckshot is even less penetration, and more damage.

I agree with an AC modifier for shotguns, but not a cone of damage. At the close ranges dealt with in fallout (50 meters or less) the shotgun blast can spread out just a little bit, but it still needs to be aimed.

Likewise almost all intermediate rifle bullets (5.56mm) have good penetration but their damage is under par. Its like being shot with an M1911. I mean a .45acp isnt nice to be hit with but its nothing like being hit with a .500 magnum, which has about the same penetration as a 5.56mm.

Now if you was going to have some linear progression of firearms that all had equivalent penetration and damage outputs this wouldnt be an issue at all, its just a bigger-is-better world then. But bullets come in fat and narrow, long and short sizes.

Hell I even like the idea of making energy weapons use their own specific ammunition types. But thats not an ammo variant issue, thats ammo type (always felt Plasma guns should use some kind of solid or liquid slurry fuel specifically designed for them, which come packaged with an energy cell, making them kinda like 2mm EC weapons)

Also somebody else made the crucial point that giving different kinds of ammo to enemies can nerf or empower them depending on where they are in the game.

There was also the argument about "Wasteland Bullets" which are crap compared to pre-war stuff, which is also an excellent way to nerf guys who are using good weapons, dropping those weapons into the player's hands, but without making the game nintendo hard to get them.

One good example of that which is prime would be the gun tent outside NCR... give the Bozar guards crap ammunition and you can actually fight them for those weapons. NPCs wielding Bozars makes them a target.

I agree about tactical options. Had some ideas for my mod (smoke grenades, cover system, that's kind of stuff) but didn't managed to implement it yet
Now I'm dreaming about new open-source Fallout engine... (another advertising )

But there must be a way to affect DT/DR by percentages (specifically DT!!!) even if all the ammo does listed damage. Not all weapons are created equal in the penetration department and if you're going to have Armor in the game at all (and it wouldnt be fallout without it) then you're going to have to take that difference into account.

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This goes without saying: I'm pretty sure that if you ask people about what stood out for them about FO combat it would be the aimed shots component, not that there happened to be different (and broken) ammo types. This is the iconic Fallout element that needs expanding on imo: huge variation of possible attack options and attack locations with differing effects, while stuffing anything that'll fit into your gun, while having it blow up in your face forcing you to use it as a club... anyway, I'm hoping to put out a combat demo of my mod in the coming months which'll hopefully showcase my view on things

edit: the bottom line of my argument is that I'd love combat in Fallout to be more of a hectic mad max brawl and less of a meticulously planned tactical endeavor, which is the direction many mechanics mods tend to take.

Honestly, if all you're doing is adapting the damage formula, leaving all else in place, then the best approach would probably be to simply strip out all the alt ammo types, set the remaining ones to neutral values (i.e. 1/1 and 0%) so that you can tell the damage you'll do with any given weapon in an instant, and perhaps remove either all the DR or DT values for armors and critters.

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Will your updated mod use your old formula or the 'neutral' ammo you mentioned here?

Honestly, if all you're doing is adapting the damage formula, leaving all else in place, then the best approach would probably be to simply strip out all the alt ammo types, set the remaining ones to neutral values (i.e. 1/1 and 0%) so that you can tell the damage you'll do with any given weapon in an instant, and perhaps remove either all the DR or DT values for armors and critters.

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Will your updated mod use your old formula or the 'neutral' ammo you mentioned here?

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Neither, I won't even be using hookscripts probably; I'm essentially just making something in the FO engine at this point.

Btw, if you were asking to see if my old damage formula is by now redundant and can be scrapped from new versions of sfall, be my guest

This goes without saying: I'm pretty sure that if you ask people about what stood out for them about FO combat it would be the aimed shots component

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I went for three whole playthroughs of Fallout 1 without even making a single called shot. My first and second characters even had Fast Shot, so the icon never even appeared. Killed the master and everyone else several times over without ever doing 'vats.

I only discovered the called shot action by accident later on when I cycled through the attack modes for the sniper rifle instead of using the inventory to reload it.

Wouldnt say it grew on me, I was disappointed that doing a called shot didnt automatically result in a critical, it only increased the chances a little.

I could do without it, and just let the game apply statistics like that and make the decision for me, or apply the location based on logical sense (eg, if its a good critical, then you must have hit the eyes or a vital area, if its a normal critical then you probably hit an extremety - - also some creature types could attract criticals in different places such as deathclaws being hit in the eyes more often).

That sounds horrible, but in a knock down drag out wasteland brawl you dont have time to think about if you're going to shoot someone in the nuts. You point the gun and keep shooting to make it stop. If anything everybody would be aiming for the head by default.

In fact I think the better choice should be (rather than targeted shot) . . . more like a choice between Rapid Fire and Aimed Shots. Aimed Shots getting the critical and locational damage chances, while Rapid Fire are unaimed snap shots that can be done easily.

Always felt being restricted to 1 shot, maybe 2 at best with 5 seconds passing by per combat round was pretty unrealistic. In real life I can probably get 3 aimed shots in that time and thats while trying to dodge people. Rapid fire snap shots and ill put 5 downrange every second, and the accuracy wont be wild either.

I think a wasteland or vault dweller with a panicked adrenaline-fed rush to survive could at least match that even if they didnt have much training.

And I stand by not being able to quickly delegate where you're going to shoot or stab somebody. Its a split second decision, in like a quarter of a second worth of hesitation, that you might go for a groin shot or try to hit them in the leg or arm. Thats not a conscious decision - - the critter is coming up on ya and you dont have the luxury to hesitate while you're deciding where you'll (try) to nail them. If anything the critter or bandit forces your hand, makes you shoot as a reaction.

Sorry for the necro bump. Because the links in the first post are all dead, I have attached the ammo mod script and HTML/JavaScript calculator (included in the RAR file) in this post.
I also fixed some bugs in the HTML/JavaScript calculator and updated the formula of new damage calculation, since the original calculator used an earilier version of formula.